Robert G. Eccles, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, didn’t mince words when he spoke at a sustainability and safety symposium organized by the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) this past spring.
“The safety profession has a marketing problem. It needs to get more shrill, more aggressive,” he said. “You are competing for mind share with the other environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors driving corporate sustainability initiatives – water resources, child labor, pollution. Companies must decide which issues to focus on and invest in. What is safety doing as a social movement? You should think of safety as a movement.